Mamay’s lawyer, Zhanara Balgabayeva, said on February 21 that she filed a request to meet see her client in person and for him to be moved to a more secure pretrial detention facility but was rebuffed on both counts.

Tribuna is one of very few independent media outlets in Kazakhstan that have either not been shut down or coopted by the authorities, leading rights activists to speculate Mamay is facing politically motivated charges. Unlike most media in Kazakhstan, Tribuna is not a beneficiary of the “state order” system, whereby the government either finances outlets outright or pays for the publication of material publicizing state policies and initiatives. It focuses primarily on social issues and has a line that tends toward robust criticism of the government and provides a platform for the few opposition politicians remaining on the scene.

Balgabayeva cited a note conveyed to her by Mamay stating that he had been “subjected to beatings in his prison cell,” but added that the claim might have been “sharply worded” and that there was no way to independently verify his wellbeing for now.

Mamay’s spouse, Inga Imanbay, said in a Facebook video message that she had met with the head of pretrial detention facility No. 18, where her husband is being held, in a failed bid to see him.

Local authorities in Kazakhstan’s business capital, Almaty, have begun demolition work on a building used to host press conferences for political activists and independent journalists.

The building was also home to KazTAG, a news agency run by two prominent media figures — father and son, Seytkazy and Aset Matayev — facing trial on charges of defrauding the state of nearly $1 million.

The official reason given for the demolition of the National Press Center is that the 300-square meter, two-story building does not correspond to earthquake standards and is therefore illegal.

The Matayevs are currently facing trial in the capital, Astana. Prosecutors have ruled out any link between the trial and the fate of the building, which is situated on a valuable piece of real estate in central Almaty. Media observers and rights activists are a little more skeptical, however, suggesting that the Matayevs have fallen victim to a crude attempt at a property grab.

Tamara Kaleyeva, head of the Adil Soz press advocacy group, told Channel 31 that she believes the charges of fraud against Matayevs are without foundation and that the situation surrounding the National Press Center headquarters can hardly be considered a coincidence.

Representatives of the National Press Center have said a second story was added to their building 10 years with all the necessary permits from the city administration. Despite that, in February, just as the charges were being level at the Matayevs, a note was delivered to the center declaring the building unfit. Appeals to reverse that decision were rejected.

Tajikistan’s General Prosecutor is considering prosecution for a Russian journalist for “inciting ethnic hatred” over an article that mocked the country and its president.

Sergei Ponomaryov’s piece in Russian tabloid Komsomolskaya Pravda about a visit to Tajikistan was published last month and featured numerous crude stereotypes. The article has already led to the shuttering of the local edition of the newspaper, which had a circulation of 5,000 in Tajikistan.

Likely most troubling for authorities in Dushanbe, however, was the fact that the article reveled among other things in ribald observations about President Emomali Rahmon. A concerted exercise in personality cult building has made Rahmon, who is alluded to exclusively in state media as the “Leader of the Nation,” off-limits to any critics.

Asia-Plus website cites General Prosecutor Yusuf Rahmon as saying Ponomaryov’s article, which was sarcastically titled “Tajikistan: Out of the Soviet Waste to a Bright Future,” will be studied for evidence of incitement to interethnic hatred.

The piece was certainly patronizing and insulting. Ponomaryov bases some of his caustic observations on a pair of Tajik characters from a popular Russian sketch show, Nasha Russia.

“On the plane from Moscow to the ancient city of Khujand, the capital of northern Tajikistan and the second city in the country, mine was the only Slavic countenance. The rest was straight-up Ravshan and Jamshuds,” he wrote.

The Nasha Russia characters are a pair of Tajik migrant laborers distinctive for their primitiveness and stupidity.

One of Kazakhstan’s last remaining independent newspapers has been ordered to pay heavy damages in a libel case that its editor believes was designed to drive it out of business.

The ruling ordering the Tribuna/Ashyk Alan newspaper to pay nearly $15,000 in damages to a former Almaty city official was the latest in a series of lawsuits lost by independent media in Kazakhstan that critics see as a blow to freedom of speech.

“This basically means the destruction of the independent media,” Zhanbolat Mamay, the newspaper’s editor, told EurasiaNet.org after the verdict on July 12. “It is an attack on freedom of speech.”

The lawsuit was filed by Sultanbek Syzdykov, a former Almaty city hall official whom the newspaper had labeled “corrupt” because he was accused of embezzling $70,000 from funds to stage the 2011 Asian Winter Games. A criminal probe was closed after he repaid the sum.

The case was widely covered in Kazakhstan’s media at the time, but Tribuna/Ashyk Alan has now been punished for reporting on it, Kazakhstan’s Adil Soz (Freedom of Speech) watchdog noted.

Denis Krivosheyev, a journalist at the bilingual Russian-Kazakh newspaper (whose name means “Platform”), wrote about it again this spring after Syzdykov was appointed to head a company belonging to city hall.

“[Syzdykov] now considers that he is not corrupt, and that we called him corrupt without grounds,” Mamay told EurasiaNet.org prior to the verdict, which awarded Syzdykov a third of the $45,000 in damages he had sought.

Kazakhstan is showing signs it is stepping up its campaign against critical journalists with the one-and-a-half year jail sentence handed down to the editor of a defunct news website.

An Almaty court on May 23 found Guzyal Baydalinova guilty of deliberately distributing false information in relation to her outlet’s reports on trouble at the country’s largest bank, Kazkommertsbank.

The Committee to Protect Journalists has slammed the verdict and demanded Baydalinova's release.

"CPJ condemns [the] sentencing of Guzyal Baydalinova, who has already spent five months behind bars merely for doing her job," CPJ Europe and Central Asia Program Coordinator Nina Ognianova said in a statement.

Baydalinova and her now-closed website, Nakanune.kz, have already been on the receiving end of Kazakhstan’s punitive libel laws, which media advocacy groups argue are specifically designed to quash independent reporting.

Last April, Kazkommertsbank filed suit after Nakanune.kz ran a letter claiming the lender was implicated in corruption. A court in Almaty in June ordered Baydalinova, who owns the domain name, to remove the offending post and pay 20 million tenge ($107,000) to compensate for damage to Kazkommertsbank’s commercial reputation. Baydalinova’s legal team had argued that the lender failed to prove that the Nakanune.kz post had in fact caused any financial damage, which should have invalidated the monetary penalty.

What appears evident from this latest verdict is that the libel laws were not considered to be a sufficiently severe tool in coping with Nakanune.kz and its staff.

Authorities in Kazakhstan reacted with startling severity to attempts to hold rallies against land reforms on May 21 by detaining possibly hundreds of journalists, activists and demonstrators.

Police had been laying the ground for their hardline approach in the days ahead of the demonstrations by arbitrarily detaining and jailing people suspected of organizing the protests.

Security was notably high in the capital, Astana, where scores of police and national guardsmen occupied the city center in anticipation of the rallies. Around 50 police officers lined the boulevard leading to the presidential palace from the landmark Baiterek monument.

The protest had been scheduled to kick off at 11 a.m. although police were left with little to do at the appointed time. As the morning wore on, police around Baiterek began detaining people they suspected of being potential protesters. Onlookers refrained from filming anything for fear of also being carted away. One man observing everything from a bench said a few buses full of people had already left the scene.

“They detain anybody who says something negative about the government,” the man said.

The United Nations Special Rapporteur on the protection of the right to freedom of expression has concluded a tour in Tajikistan and found the situation there to be particularly dire.

Speaking at a press conference in Dushanbe on March 9, David Kaye spoke, among other things, about his concern for the jailed members of the banned Islamic Renaissance Party of Tajikistan.

Tajikistan is currently experiencing one of its most intense waves of state repression since the fall of the Soviet Union, a trend that reach its apex in September with the designation of the IRPT, the country’s only serious opposition force, as a terrorist group.

Kaye’s remarks echoed those of rights activists who worry that Tajikistan’s proximity to Afghanistan has provided it with the cover to freely persecute critics of the government.

“I recognize that there is a serious security problem in this part of the world, in particular in Tajikistan and in this neighborhood. But I’m afraid that the security situation has been used as a pretext, as an excuse, to crack down on freedom of expression, whether in the media or in civil society,” he said.

Kaye said that proper media coverage of events inside the country has suffered as a result.

“It is clear to me that legal protections in the constitution are being eroded and that independent journalists are facing serious forms of harassment that is leading to self-censorship and a lack of information throughout the country,” he said.

In a surprising precedent, the trial of an independent journalist in Kazakhstan has culminated with an acquittal.

A court in Almaty ruled on February 29 to clear Yulia Kozlova of drug possession charges, bringing a close to a trial the reporter’s supporters said was politically motivated.

Kozlova’s lawyer had complained throughout proceedings that the two week-long trial was riddled with procedural irregularities.

The charges against Kozlova, who writes for an embattled website called Nakanune.kz that features regular and robust criticism of the authorities, arose from a police raid on her apartment in December. Investigators claimed that during a search for incriminating material related to a separate case involving reporting appearing on Nakanune.kz they found marijuana in a tea caddy.

Kozlova reacted with tearful surprise and delight to her acquittal, video posted on social networks showed. The verdict was unexpected in a country where innocent verdicts are rare, particularly in cases involving independent journalists.

One possibility is that the government may be seeking to mitigate the wave of international criticism that has been timed unfortunately to surge ahead of parliamentary elections on March 20.

Kozlova had staunchly denied the accusations against her.

“I link this to my work,” she told a court hearing attended by EurasiaNet.org in which she gave her testimony on February 18, pointing to her reporting as the source of her legal troubles.

Nakanune.kz was set up by journalists who used to report for Respublika, Kazakhstan’s most hard-hitting independent newspaper until it was closed down in 2012.

Seytkazy Matayev, head of the Union of Journalists and president of the National Press Club, and his son Aset Matayev, director of the KazTAG news agency, have been questioned over the embezzlement of some 340 million tenge ($970,000) in public funds between 2011 and 2015.

Details of the case were released on February 22 by the state’s National Bureau for Counteracting Corruption in a statement, which said that investigations are ongoing into whether another 169 million tenge ($480,000) allocated by local government bodies had also been stolen.

The statement accused Seytkazy Matayev, a well-respected figure on Kazakhstan’s media scene, of embezzling the funds and of tax evasion to the tune of 327 million tenge ($934,000), but did not name his son. The charges carry a jail term of up to 12 years.

The money was allocated by the government’s Information Technology Committee and state-owned telecoms company Kazakhtelecom for the publication of material publicizing their affairs, the anti-corruption bureau said.

The two categorically deny the accusations. “We openly state that we have not broken the law and have not stolen budget funds,” they said in a statement published on the website of the Adil Soz (Free Speech) watchdog.

As should probably have been expected, a countersuit filed by journalist Dayirbek Orunbekov against the president of Kyrgyzstan has fallen at the first hurdle.

Pervomaisky district court’s ruling on February 15 was clear — Almazbek Atambayev did not insult the editor of Kyrgyz-language news website Maalymat.kg.

Orunbekov has already said he will appeal the decision within the month at a city court in the capital, Bishkek.

The dispute dates back to late 2014, when Orunbekov ran a story accusing Atambayev of being implicated in the 2010 ethnic clashes in Osh between Uzbek and Kyrgyz communities that left several hundred dead. Atambayev only assumed the presidency after winning an election in 2011, but he was serving in the interim government that took power after the bloody overthrow of President Kurmanbek Bakiyev in April 2010.

The General Prosecutor’s Office responded to the piece by filing a defamation lawsuit in April 2015 against Orunbekov.

Orunbekov lost the case and was ordered to pay $26,000 in damages to Atambaev.

Media advocacy groups were unimpressed.

The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe’s media rights watchdog Dunja Mijatovic in December urged Kyrgyzstan to desist from slapping onerous penalties on journalists for civil defamation.

“Excessive fines imposed on journalists and media outlets as a means of protecting the head of a state can lead to self-censorship,” Mijatovic said at the time. “Disproportionate and high fines are detrimental to freedom of the media.”

These rebukes tend to fall on deaf ears in the region, so Orunbekov took matters into his own hands by filing a countersuit in retaliation for Atambayev accusing him of being a slanderer-for-hire. The president leveled his accusation during the annual end-of-year press conference in December.